


I'll Follow You Into The Dark

by roachpatrol



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Black Romance, M/M, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-02
Updated: 2011-11-02
Packaged: 2017-10-25 15:36:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He heads up to the roof, already chewing on his awful fucking fish, and you know he is going to spend the night bleakly glaring at the stars and smoking thin black overpriced cigarettes and listening to insipid love songs loud enough to get the police called on you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Follow You Into The Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to meowgon for the excellent last-minute beta!

_In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule  
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black  
And I held my tongue as she told me  
"Son, fear is the heart of love,"  
So I never went back..._

\--Death Cab For Cutie

*

These are the things you hate about your roomate: he’s nowhere near as intelligent as he thinks he is. He takes hours-long showers. His taste in music is shit and he sings like a stopped-up drain and all the wrong parts, the choruses right over the verses, at the top of his lungs, at three in the morning when you just need some fucking quiet to finish your coding, and he leaves his mugs wherever he finishes his drinks. He stammers a little, when he’s upset, just enough to be grating, and talks like some kind of pirate wannabe the rest of the time, an awkward not-quite foreign drawl slurring out all his vowels.

He eats, get this, _raw fish._ Not like sushi, but like he buys whole cuts of salmon, tuna, carp, tilapia, you name it, pounds of it a week, and he piles the awful pink-white-silver chunks all wrapped in their thin plastic in the crisper drawers where they taint everything else in the goddamn fridge with a sick oceanic corpse-stink. Then on certain nights he slams in the door like a thunderstorm, throws his keys against the wall, drops his peacoat on the carpet. He storms into the kitchen, hurls open the door to the fridge like he wants to rip it off its hinges. You hear the squeaky rustle as he sorts through all those foul packages from where you’re grinding out levels on the couch, and then he closes the door just as violently and you can smell the sharp reek of raw flesh the moment he unwraps it.

He heads up to the roof, already chewing, and you know he is going to spend the night bleakly glaring at the stars and smoking thin black overpriced cigarettes and listening to insipid love songs loud enough to get the police called on you.

*

He came into your life like a hurricane. Exactly like a hurricane. There were all these warning signs you didn’t heed, rising winds of change: your servers starting to go down, one of your harddrives crashing more and more frequently, a set of headphones you bought that you didn’t really need, a friend that needed a loan that you shouldn’t have given them, a few too many nights on the town and sloppy patch jobs made out of equal parts impatience and blind optimism and four-in-the-morning coding benders, and then half your hardware shorted the fuck out regardless and you realized that you weren’t going to be making next month’s rent on your own, not if you wanted to keep eating, and you were fucked, totally fucked.

Karkat had told you that he would sooner eat shit and die than move back in with you ever again and Terezi had laughed herself sick at the suggestion and both of them were even broker than you were, curled up three years into their law degrees and cutting coupons for ramen and so blissfully, stupidly, gratingly happy with each other. You didn’t actually want to live with them, either.

So you’d gritted your teeth and started wading through creepers on craigslist. One week and fifteen applicants of escalating horror later you had opened your door, despair-jittery and stressed down to your core, and you’d seen this guy standing there. A few years younger than you, maybe, but not many. He was pale all over, pale white skin and pale blond hair, like he was made of ice, and his face, too, was like ice, a set and brittle coldness in his violet eyes and in that brief moment everything felt so perfectly _clear_ and you were breathless with the sudden calm. It had felt like waking after a long and terrible dream of falling. You’d thought _I can do this, it’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay._

Then he’d blinked white lashes against his white cheeks and said “ _Sollux?_ ” the way that no one in the entire universe had ever said your name before, some weird confabulation of shock and horror and disappointment, and it was like getting punched in the fucking brain.

“Wow, hello to you too, Sunshine,” you’d said, unnerved. “You here about the room?”

He’d nodded, _conspicuously_ failed to explain how the hell he fucking knew your fucking name, and pushed past you into your place. He swept through each of your rooms like he was measuring the damage, like your place was the corpse of some vast trophy animal he had to slaughter. He looked at your computers, your sound system, he curled his lip at the contents of your fridge and stroked fingers over the spines of your books like he was testing to see if any of them bit him for it. He stood in the workroom you were resentfully willing to convert to a second bedroom and he nodded, decisively.

“I can help you clear this heap out,” he’d said, like it was a foregone conclusion that the space was going to be his, and you looked at him standing there, straight-backed and so pale, and you’d thought of dragons, for some reason, you’d thought of storms at sea. There was something so terribly inhuman about him and it fascinated you as much as it creeped you out. You were never going to like liking anyone as much as you were going to like hating this guy, you could feel it in your fucking bones.

“I’ll need your half of the rent up front,” you said, a flimsy defense, and you both knew it. He nodded, like a king granting some peon leave to kiss his fucking rings.

He was wearing rings, actually, his corpse-white fingers glittering with gold and violet. _Tyrian,_ you thought, and felt distantly sick. You didn’t remember if the word was supposed to be a color or an adjective.

You could feel the warning-winds rising as he left, step by measured step, his violet eyes sweeping over your face like a scourge as he took his exit. You shouldn’t do this, you knew, you absolutely _should not_ do this, you should pick out one of the potheads or the divorcees or the college kids or that woman with six cats. But you were going to, you were, you couldn’t do anything else. When he was gone, you’d closed the door and locked it and then you sat on the floor. You felt hollow, scrubbed raw with shock and dizzy with some emotion you couldn’t name, some strangely giddy horror.

You didn’t even know his fucking name.

*

The thing is that he is kind of okay, actually, when you’re drunk. He is actually disgustingly okay when he’s drunk. He actually smiles, soft and sweet, like the two of you are... comrades, or something. Friends. He’s got a really pretty smile. You hate it when he gets drunk.

Also he only ever buys indie brewery ales that cost like a whole mainframe and have obnoxious awards all over their labels and he picks at the labels and leaves damp little pills of paper all over the couch. And sometimes when he’s asleep he looks so fucking _young,_ some runaway teenager with all his sins gone slack, and you wonder where the fuck he even came from, if he’s got anyone out there wondering where the hell he went.

*

As the opening strains of some mournful fucking song about love and death and how hard it is to be some randomass white boy start filtering down, you save your files and send your computer to sleep.

Then you follow him up to the roof.

He looks startled to see you there, deeply and utterly surprised that you apparently give some kind of damn about him. The wary tilt of his jaw as he takes a drag of his stupid fucking clove cig breaks something inside of you that you are very fiercely, painfully glad to feel shatter.

You pull the cigarette out of his mouth and throw it over the edge of the roof. Then you throw away the half-chunk of cod or carp or whatever it is he was holding too loosely in one hand, and then you take his fucking radio out of the other hand and throw off the roof too, and hiss with glee when you hear it crash against the ground, far below.

“Wh-- what the _hell,_ Sol,” Eridan says flatly.

Then you kiss him. He tastes like you were really horrible in a past life and this is your reward, and he makes a kind of strangled moan against your lips that means the same thing. You kiss him because he’s got part of you hostage inside himself and you don’t know what his fucking terms are, you kiss him because you hate how he overgels his hair and how he puts beansprouts in his scrambled eggs and how deeply sad he looks when it rains, how he wears loneliness like a cloak he expects never to be able to take off. Because he throws away your energy drinks on account of how he’s convinced they cause cancer, because he can kick your ass at first person shooters and because he actually has literally kicked at least one honest-to-fucking-goodness _labrador puppy,_ you _saw_ him, who even does that?

*

Another thing you hate about him is that you have never figured out if he’s gay or bi or just a desperate, twitchy douchebag; he’s equally shitty to men and women, standoffishly callous for all that he dresses like he’s going to die if he doesn’t get a cock up his ass in the next two seconds.

You hate the way he dresses, too, it’s like if Captain Hook and Count Chocula had a baby who desperately wanted to be hardboiled. He wears ridiculous coats with flaring hems and too many buttons, he wears scarves and fedoras and costume jewelry, tacky chunky things with skulls and keys and butterflies, he has chuck tailors in every color of the rainbow and some colors the rainbow’s disowned, he wears skinny jeans so tight you can only guess that maybe he totes his dick around in foldspace and you hate that he makes you wonder about his dick.

You hate that sometimes when he catches you pondering the mysteries of his dick he doesn’t call you on staring at another dude’s package, he just kind of looks sad, and leaves the room.

*

Here, now, he dissolves under your mouth like a sandcastle under a wave, sprawling ungracefully backwards and palming big infuriating handfuls of your ass completely uninvited. You have never been this turned on; the fact that you have only ever slept with girls before feels distantly relevant. Maybe you’re gay, maybe you’re bi, maybe this is just one more mistake in a long line of mistakes, another pretty young thing who was dumb enough to let you in, but it doesn’t feel like it. You’re three years too late for college experimentation, and you wouldn’t insult the both of you with that condescending little label. This isn’t experimentation, this is fucking _war,_ this is just retaliation for every single time he smoked inside, or dug his fingers into your tense shoulders in just the right place to make your neck crack like machine gun fire, and for how he’s seen you at your worst, stinking and unshaven and shaking with despair and he has never, not once, had the decency to be scared of you or, worse-- better?-- scared _for_ you, and this is for how sometimes you can hear him gasping, softly, in the night as he touches himself.

*

“Do you ever feel like you don’t belong?” he asked you once.

“Tch,” you’d grunted. “You’re talking to a terminal tech-head, Ampora. What about my bony ass screams _in-crowd_?” You were working on a webdesign, something for a legal firm Terezi had hooked you up with but they’d wanted an actual video intro, the pretentious fucking cockbags, and you couldn’t get the timing right.

“No, I mean like, really, for real. Like you-- you came from somewh-- _where,_ you had a fuckin’... _destiny._ Like you’re just some kinda fuckin’ _facsimile_ a’ who you’re suppose’a be. Don’t you feel like that?”

He sounded really upset, really intense. The kind of intense that tended to make him light his awful clove smokes indoors even though it gave you asthma attacks. You’d pulled your headphones down around your neck and gave him a long, measuring once-over.

“Are you high?” you enquired.

“God, _fuck you!_ ” he shouted. He threw his hands up in the air, the Phantom of the fucking Opera pitching a hissy fit, and he stomped thunderously into the kitchen. “Do you want some fuckin’ tuna melts, dickstain, on account’a how that’s what I’m gonna be fuckin’ making?”

“No!” you called back, already putting your headphones back on. “I hate your fucking tuna melts!”

He made you some anyway and flicked crumbs at the back of your neck until you ate them.

Everything smelled like burnt cheddar for the rest of the night.

*

“I w- _want_ you,” he gasps out, into the cavern of your mouth, and you grind down hard against him, your jeans a maddening frustration. He’d let you fuck him in any hole you’d care to claim, probably, but just having him underneath you is enough. You tear down his pants, squeeze his dick through his black silk briefs and _god_ does that feel good. He sobs, underneath you, big explosive bursts of anguish ripping out of him as you knead at him, pump the soft fabric up and down. His fingers make terrible noises as he drags them over the rough gritty concrete of the roof and you don’t care if the whole city watches you take this boy apart.

You tug his underwear down his hips and get personally acquainted with his dick, you get biblical with it, the softness of the skin and the warmth of it and the damp tip that makes him shudder all over when you tease it, and the way he cries out for you is the most chillingly intimate thing you have ever done with anyone.

“I _hate_ you,” you say, soft and scared and wondering, and he fucking _rattles_ against the cement, spread-out like he’s making a snow angel right there in the grit, and he comes all over his stupid screen-printed Black Flag t-shirt. His eyes are as wide and blank as if you had killed him and in some confused and yearning way you kind of wish you had.

He pulls his underwear back up over his deflating dick, and then curls on to his side, his white fingers brushing up against your thigh. You realize, abruptly, that you are achingly hard for him, have been since you heard him beating up the fridge.

“Let me,” he says, a wretched kind of reverent, his fingers cold and dirty against your stomach. “God, please, Sol, _let me_.”

You can’t do anything else but nod.

*

You hate him. You hate his movies, music, food, clothes, personal habits, his moods and his tempers, you hate the little kindnesses he foists off on you and how they never manage to be worth the massive impositions and how those fucking impositions-- the fucking fish, the fucking smoking, the fucking storming around like the Little Prince post-puberty, all _Do we even have souls? Do we even have free will? What do you think’s going to happen to us when we die?_ shit that you never wanted to fucking think about in the first place, the Nirvana at three in the goddamn morning and Vampire Weekend at four-- all the horrible shit he dumps on you still never manages to erase the way he can be so damn _beautiful,_ and it all sits in you like some malignant tumor wrapping tighter and tighter around your heart every day. You have no idea what he does for a living, where he goes all day, who else he even knows besides you, you hate who he must be when you’re not around to see.

*

You lie back and he dips his mouth down to your heated, hungry flesh and you hate every single person who’s gotten here before you.


End file.
